Erasable Intentions

Ernst Gombrich introduced me to this idea: as  we make marks our imagination slips away from its original intention and follows the suggestions of the marks we are making. Each mark, each stroke, each line drives us to new possibilities.  If we fight against our reaction  to  what’s happening in the paint then, we sabotage the art work. We sabotage the process that is the heart of making art, of writing a story or a song.  Gombrich said  we erase our past imagination with each new mark and create a new pathway for  hypothesizing, for our imagination. Because we are unfolding events ourselves, our art work will reflect that unfolding. You and I are not the people we once were.  In every way are in continuous change.  We aren’t the student we remember from High School, or the person at the altar getting married.  Even the person we remember ourselves to have been keeps changing, our memories are in flux.   We carry only an illusion of constancy  with us. If we try to impose this constant illusion on our painting it will end up  neither surprising us nor sustaining our attention.  I have selected some images which have unfolded as I worked on them. The appeared to have directed their own unfolding, their own changes just as the song writer who says the song wrote itself.  I tried to unfold with the paint.  Kenneth Clark said this was the root of expressive painting. He also said it had a drawback, “With expressive painting you either get brilliance or a train wreck.”  I tried to unfold with the paint, follow the paint.  My hand makes a mark, a gesture which I notice is not quite what I anticipated.  I will follow that mark with another to complement it, to add to it or  to substract from it  but, not to correct it.  The gestures of the hands lead the brain.  That is the miracle of Rembrandt, Turner and De Kooning.  In my first example I began with a red Roman Capriccio. I let the first stage dry. I felt unsatisfied. I covered the painting with blue paint and removed areas of the blue paint to reveal  a series of figures.     To me these figures  appeared out of the 15th century and before.  I didn’t copy them from any source, they just appeared in the paint. In my next example I begin with a photo taken above NYC.     My next image  was a small oil sketch on linen.  I pushed the colors, simplified the design and exaggerated the curvilinear perspectival space. I wanted  bigger deeper space. I remembered Mondrian’s ” Broadway  Boogie Woogie” paintings with lines of segmented color. They were maps without linear perspective.  I was re-making Mondrian but, with curvilinear perspective.  I have painted several versions of this subject.  The design, the colors, the dimensions continue to change as I see them change while applying the paint.